Negotiation Q&A and Videos

I know it's best practice not to reveal your target salary or target salary range to recruiters of a specific company and it's definitely bad to reveal your current salary.

But what happens when the recruiter is not for a specific company, but instead a headhunter? It feels weird to withhold my desired salary since they can say to me "buddy, I'm not trying to negotiate against you, I'm trying to help you get what you're looking for." Are they right? Should I reveal that info or is it still better to not tell them?

Additionally, what about revealing to them who I'm currently interviewing with? I did that recently and am a little paranoid that the recruiter might somehow contact the companies I'm interviewing with to harm my chances. I'm pretty sure this is unlikely, but it got me thinking that maybe it wasn't smart to reveal that info.

Recently got promoted from SDE1 to SDE2. I was already in the lower range of the SDE1 salary, and was hoping the promotion will change this. However I only got a 10% raise, putting me on a much lower range in comparison with salaries of other SDE2s in the company. I didn't really get a chance to negotiate promotion here and not sure what would've been the best way to go about it.

Is the best move for me to just switch companies? Should I stay in the role longer so that I can interview for SDE2 positions with more YOE? Is it worth to bring up data about co-worker salaries and trying to negotiate a salary increase using that?

I felt under-leveled and undervalued in my existing org so I interviewed in a top product company and landed an offer. Once I viewed the master class on Taro. I feel it's more than the compensation it's the team and leadership.

How do I politely deny the matched offer?

Hey folks,

I'm currently facing a tough decision - whether to ask for a raise at my current company. I am unsure if it's the right time to do so or not. Here's a little context to help you understand my situation

My timeline in the company:

• In 2023
  • I joined the company as a Sr SWE II (L4)
  • I joined the company nine months ago on August 23'
  • I made it to the second review cycle of the year (mid-October), and I got a "Consistently meeting expectations." My manager then said that he was very impressed that I managed to get so much done in that short time and that he could see strong signs of a Staff Engineer (L5) in me.
  • I shipped the most important project in Q4, 2023, on time. I even ended up as the technical lead of that project (the Staff engineer in that project got pip-ed, but that's another story)
• In 2024:
  • I mentored a Sr SWE I (L3) on her first project as a lead.
  • I'm the lead of the web working group
  • I'm interviewing candidates almost on a weekly basis
  • I'm one of the owners of the Design System initiative
  • I just got a "Consistently exceeding expectations" in our current review cycle. I've been praised for how easy it is to work with me, my technical quality, my communication skills, and my thoughtful PR reviews. And that I should keep working on my influence across the organization.

How things are right now:

• My previous manager quit to join another startup, and I got an interim manager (we're hiring another manager for my team)
• I ended up talking about salary adjustments with my previous manager the other day (there, I didn't ask for a raise; it was just a casual conversation). He told me that the company does a compensation review every January and that I wasn't considered for the one that happened in January 2024 because I didn't join earlier than July 2023.
• The next performance review will happen in mid-Oct 2024.
• I will be leading a new tiger team (6 engs) until the end of Q2.

Questions I have right now:

• Is this the right time to ask for a raise?
• I've never asked for a raise.
• I know for a fact that an L3 has a pretty similar (<5%) salary to me, and I know that another L4 has a >5% salary than me.
• Should I wait until I finish this new project, the next performance review, or my first anniversary?
• We're in the hockey stick growth stage.
• I also really like working here, and the market has been bad lately.

Thanks!

I am a university student who will graduate this year, and on this Tuesday (tomorrow) I will be having an offer conversation with the startup that I interned at this summer. I have watched the negotiation course and it certainly has provided invaluable information, but there are just some details I want to get opinions from the community so I can maximize my compensation.

First, some facts:

• From what I gathered from the Internet and people working there, the base and bonus part of the package will be slightly lower than FAANG, despite the company considering itself to have a higher hiring bar. I don't see this company going public any time soon, so I will consider the equity as paper money.
• I'm in the process with two other top-tier companies (TC > 220k even w/o negotiation) but both are still in the early stages. I should be able to finish both interviews before the offer deadline.
• My feedback from the internship has been extremely positive (basically my feedback was "keep doing what you are doing").

Based on what I've learned from the course, I think my strategy for negotiation is as follows:

• Disclose as little info as possible on the call as possible. Do not express that I want a boost in TC on the call. Try to defer everything to email with something like "I need to collect all the data I have before making this huge decision". But at the mean time I should at least ask some questions about the offer to show my interest.
• In terms of the components in the package, I should prioritize base, bonus, and sign-on instead of equity.

And after the call, I'll have two options:

• Ask for an increase in TC before finishing the interview with the two other companies, because if I get rejected and I will lose the leverage.
• Do this after the interviews finish. This presents a higher risk, but also a higher reward.

So my main question is which option is better, because I don't know how much stronger an actual competing offer is than an ongoing interview, and I cannot tell how likely I'll pass the other interviews yet.

Two other questions

• Should I explicitly say how much more I want? If so, what is the right amount to request? Match FAANG in cash? Exceed FAANG in cash because equity is too uncertain and according to the company itself, the hiring bar is higher?
• Should I split my request into multiple small increments or just tell them "give me this amount"?

Hello! I recently received an offer letter for a senior software engineer role. It seems pretty good. When asked for a range, I gave $215 to 305k. They came back with somewhere around the midpoint. Also, the equity is very generous for a Series A startup... it seems like a good faith offer.

I'm expecting two other offers next week and have a work trial in another interview pipeline for a director-level role. Should I attempt to negotiate a signing bonus to take the offer without waiting for my other options to come through?

Hello! I'm in the final stages of my interview process at a few companies. I heard two days ago that I'd be getting an offer from a public company and just today a Series B company said they were going to extend an offer. (I have 30 minute chat with a Series A CEO tomorrow and an offer seems likely) The Series B company today gave me their comp range for Staff, but did not make a specific offer. The recruiter asked me to come up with what I wanted my comp to be now that I know the band for Staff. It felt odd not getting a specific number.. but I suppose I can consider for the purpose of negotiation that they are offering the top of the range and I can negotiate from there? The recruiter did say I was their best interview (!) so I feel like I have a fair bit of leverage here to potentially get an offer well above the stated band.

This is a bit further complicated however by the fact that I disagree with the methodology the recruiter used to value their options & tokens. I.e. if I agreed with their valuation the TC at the top of their range is what I am targeting, but according to my calculations the TC at the top of the range is 35% too low. So I'd probably need them to double the equity/token package to make this worthwhile. The top of the range for base is also below my base target, but not that dramatically. . . more like 5%.

Am I better off asking for a Sr Staff leveling or just ask for comp that's above the band for the Staff title? I imagine bands are more strict at public companies than they are at a Series B.

Finally, I'm wondering what people think about adding acceleration & severance upon termination w/o cause as a negotiation lever. Given the volatility of the cryptocurrency market I am concerned about job security in this role, so some security that would be provided by an acceleration upon termination clause in my contract would help me swallow the somewhat low base & illiquid equity that they are offering. Do Series B companies ever provide that to non-VP/C-level hires?

These are questions for Rahul since he put together a great negotiation course that I completed the other day.

I recently skimmed the Design Guru's course on negotiation, and two questions came up

1. How/when do you negotiate? - Live on a phone call/in-person right after the interview, after the interview via email or via phone? What is the most ideal? Design Gurus said email is the best mode.
2. What do you do if they explicitly ask you what your salary # amount is? - They actually asked via email (hiring manager at Meta) before my phone screen what companies I was interviewing at (to name them). Is there a script to be able to not disclose this?

I received an offer from a Big Tech company for a contract Data Eng role. Whoot!

While I'm happy to have gotten the offer, I'm nervous about it being a contract role and in particular I'm nervous about the nature of the team.

My mentor told me to reverse-interview the hiring manager:

His message to me was:

Ask: I’d like to get a better sense of what I’ll be working on and how that work fits in with the rest of the team - I’m curious what lead to the need to open up this role?
Then based on what they say, you usually follow up with where do you see this position and work fit in after the initial 6 months.

So he says to ask the hiring manager about:

1. what work I'll be doing
2. how the role opened up
3. possibility of extending or converting to FTE

I'll add my own question which is how much am I working solo vs. with others? In my convo with the hiring manager, he indicated that this role is to maintain Paid Marketing Pipelines which the team he manages is not focusing on. He said there's a lot of work to be done cleaning up tech debt, which involves migrating SQL pipelines scheduled with Airflow to dbt. That sounds like bread and butter Data Engineering, although it's definitely not the cool and shiny work.

I have 5 questions, 2 here and 3 in the first comment because of the character limit:

1. Any other quick thoughts about what to ask about? There are lot of great questions , , and questions like and . I plan on going through those, but if there's anything I should def ask about, it'd be great to know!
2. In talking to the Hiring Manager, should I negotiate before or after Reverse Interviewing? My mentor says to negotiate after learning more about the role which seems intuitive to me as I want to make sure I want to accept it before negotiating. But Gergely Orosz says very much the opposite . What gives?

I'm at the 2nd round of interviews with an ~80 person company. I did well in the first interview with the hiring manager, hence my getting to the second interview. This one is with the hiring manager's manager, i.e. my would-be skip.

The Calendar invite for the interview has this description:

In this interview, you will be meeting with Jim our VP.  He will talk to you more about the role and answer any questions you may have.  Please be prepared to discuss your salary expectations with Jim during this interview.

How should I handle this discussion? Is this different from handling a recruiter reaching out for a role where it's imperative not to give the first number?

I'm assuming I should:

1. Not give the first number
2. Try to focus on the value I can bring to the company

Anything else?

Thanks!

I’m currently an entry level engineer with 3 years of experience. I’m afraid when I look for another job, the recruiters will ask me what level I am and get down leveled. Is this something I should be worrying about? If the recruiters ask me such question, how should I respond?

I've just completed my onsite with a big tech company. The recruiter told me I can expect to hear back by the end of the week. We had a call where she asked me about any other offers I have and timelines. In this dynamic, does having other offers or at least telling the recruiter I have other offers make it more likely I will get an offer? Should I tell the recruiter I have other offers? I told the recruiter that I can wait till the end of the week but am expecting other offers next week.

Should I try and communicate urgency toward getting an offer sooner rather than later?

And to generalize this question, is there anything else I should do while waiting?

Hey All,

I have just completed interviewing at a seed-stage startup that is creating some stuff that I can really resonate with. The company is profitable, has huge growth metrics in the past 18 months, and tons of room to grow. I do have experience building the type of developer platform they are trying to build which is sort of specialized and I think the interviews went really well and according to the JD, after the onsite interviews the next step is an offer.

I received an email the next day asking me to schedule 15 minutes with the CEO and the Lead Engineer to discuss "next steps". I'm used to working at larger enterprises and tech companies, where I deal with recruiters and the interview processes are pretty straight forward and don't diverge much. I am hoping these next steps are to discuss a potential offer and to make sure I'm good to go with moving from a larger company to smaller company. I do have a few questions for the community though.

Assuming they discuss extending an offer:

1. Should I prepare to discuss comp? If so, is it unrealistic to expect a similar base comp to what I have now (~190k)? Basically all the senior engineers come from FAANG or mid-sized tech companies like me.
2. I'm not actively looking and am comfortable where I am at currently, albeit I am totally uninterested in my work and dread going in everyday, and really like what this company is building. Is there room to negotiate especially with no offers?
3. What are some good resources to gauge what sort of equity I should be looking for? I would be one of the first 7 FTE SWEs and a more senior one.

Also, are there any red-flags I should look out here?

Hi There,

I am based in the UK and have been offered a staff computer vision engineer position at a growth-stage startup. The offer has already been finalized, but the company's CTO has requested my previous employer's recent payslip. This is unusual in my experience, as no one has ever asked for my payslips before.

I initially thought they might use the payslip to determine my compensation, but that has already been decided and communicated to me. I negotiated a signing bonus based on my expected salary expectations and a "made-up current salary (range )" because the base salary offered was not appropriate for the market rate.

During the interview process, I mentioned my current salary, which was not the exact real number (as per Rahul's advice). However, now that they are asking for my payslip, it will reveal my actual salary. I am concerned that this might leave a bad impression and create trust issues with the CTO, potentially affecting our working dynamics.

I love the team and the project, and everything else seems promising. However, I am unsure about how to proceed with this situation. The recruiter mentioned that the payslip is required for administrative purposes, but I am still hesitant. Any advice on how to handle this would be greatly appreciated.

I have 3 years of experience working as a backend developer.

I rejected 2 offers because the salary rise was about 12% and I expect at least 30% salary rise.

And this brought a doubt in my head. That is, if at this moment should I be looking for more money or more knowledge, expand my network, or what should I be prioritizing.

Please, help.

When researching a company to find out:

1. The kind of work they do there
2. The culture

... the best thing I can think of to do is find former employees on LinkedIn and ask them. This helps me do well in the interviews (because I know what the company does and often what role I'm filling) and know whether I should accept a job (if the company is not toxic).

My question is, is there some kind of limit to the number of people I reach out to? Right now, I reach out to 5 people, and usually at least 3 get back to me pretty quickly. I find 3 is usually enough to get the info I'm looking for, particularly if they were on the team/department I'm interviewing with.

I feel like the answer to this depends on the size of the company. If it's a small startup, there might be more risk involved in asking folks because it can get back to people in the company. And even if it's not a startup, asking 20 former employees for their thoughts doesn't seem smart or reasonable, even if it does involve sending the same message to each.

Curious to get people's thoughts.

Thanks!

I am frequently being told be senior software engineer/technical women that they think I am outrageous for saying I don't prefer to take a role that pays entry level in this market (which I know sucks), as any other AI/ML engineer I know would take opt out of roles at tech companies (FAANGMULA, startups or non-profits) where there expected comp was that of a college intern in undergrad CS (yes I've seen these roles on a number of women in tech Slacks and found it especially disturbing. The mods and recruiters that manage those Slacks just say "we can't control the market, but no job is worse than a job." The counterpoint is there is a database of salary transparency showing women getting paid at parity (and underpaid) across the board for technical positions and non-technical positions in tech (and other industries), and I am surrounded by people that tell me I am getting underpaid (everyone who is not a woman). For women, I got attacked when I mentioned that this is a pay equity gap and most women I know have a range of at least $100/hr or $180-200K for a senior SWE position in AI (given 8-10 years experience BS/BA or MS or not). I was also told by one person that it was impossible to find a staff position making more than $250K and I'm like uhhmmm I've seen EVERY counter argument to this - what gives?

Question: How can people from historically disadvantaged communities who tend to get paid less negotiate for higher salaries BY targeting companies that pay a higher pay band (not companies with a lower one)? How can they create leverage what they have gotten paid (for example, I have consulting / contract made 4x my original rate in the past, which when I did the math is is comparable to an L6/L7/E6/E7).

I find myself completely perplexed when people tell me they're stuck at a level and then saying a lot of negative things that signal to me they're in the far lowest of the payband/percentile and everyone else I should be listening to is at the highest end of the payband/percentile of a posted salary range (most people who I actually listen to and make sense)?

I've been interviewing. I interviewed well with one company, and the company was ready to give me an offer. I told them I was in various stages of interviewing with other companies and would like to decide by 11/26. The recruiter asked me how I would decide. I named some criteria regarding developer tooling/mentoring/on-call. And I also mentioned I would compare numbers if I had other offers. The recruiter also mentioned they would like me to decide so that they know whether to move forward with other candidates in the pipeline, and she would talk with the hiring manager to see if they needed to move faster. She scheduled an additional call with a principal engineer on the topic of dealing with tech debt on Thursday but never got back to me about what the hiring manager said.

This company is high on my list except for possibly one other company I am wrapping up interviews with tomorrow, though I have another company with interviews on Monday. If I pass those interviews, they may want another interview to decide the level to offer me (between Senior and Staff).

How would you advise me to respond?

I recently received an offer from a series D unicorn. They are giving me the option to trade off base salary and sign-on bonus for more equity and vice versa.  I’ve heard conflicting opinions about whether you should optimise for cash or for equity (some say optimise for equity, others say optimise for pay), so I want to get a good understanding of what factors I should consider when trading off pay for more equity?

I'm fortunate enough to have come from a decent background, so I don't need to worry about paying off debt or anything like that. It also happens that I live near family so cost of living isn't too big of an issue. So this is more about maximizing my compensation without having to worry about anything else.

Also, this company told me that they don’t negotiate, but I told them that I had a competing offer that paid me 15K more base. They gave more reasons about why they don't negotiate but said they’d see what they can do. I ended up getting the 15K. In previous calls, they definitely showed that the really wanted me (can tell through their language), so I was wondering if I could’ve gotten more? There’s a lot of factors/details that I left out to preserve anonymity but I’m happy to (carefully) provide any details left out.

I'm a Senior 2 Engineer who received 'Exceeding Expectations' followed by 'Defining New Standards' in my last two review cycles, demonstrating consistent Staff-level performance.

About a month ago, I initiated compensation discussions with my manager, who has escalated this to the CTO. Today, I learned through informal channels about another team member's who got promoted to Senior 2 compensation being higher than mine.

• How do you professionally handle compensation discussions when you've discovered pay discrepancies through informal channels? Is it appropriate to bring this up with management? I wonder what to do because the conversation about a raise started about a month ago before I knew about my other colleague new salary.
• What's the best way to balance showing I'm serious about needing an adjustment without overplaying my hand, given I don't have another offer yet?
• For those who've been in management: how do you prefer engineers approach these conversations, especially when they've already expressed they might leave if compensation isn't adjusted?

Hello, One of the developers is leaving my team and the company is planning to handover her work to me in addition to what I have been doing currently. Although I can do that, I also want them to increase my pay. How can I ask for this?

I took the and found it very helpful. Especially the part where we should create a company list, rank them, and then start applying based on tier. It turns job-hunting into a probability and numbers game and it removes a lot of stress

However, what do you do when you get an offer from a company that isn't high on your list, so you can't accept the offer because you still want to apply to companies higher on the list?

Throughout the interview you have tried to convince them that you are excited for the position, so now how do you tell them you can't take the offer, without burning the bridge or getting blacklisted?

How do you also not feel guilty rejecting the offer when you know you are not as serious about the position as the hiring end?

Today is my first day at a new role. I am very optimistic about this role.

At the same time, some of the places that I applied are only now following up. One role in particular has the potential for a 100k+ TC increase, or over 30%. This is meaningful to me. What mental checks should I do before accepting the interview?

If I interview and receive an offer, would it be best to accept it and leave or bring this up to my current employer and seek a raise? Would that set a sour tone?

I joined my company 1.5 years ago. When my recruiter asked for my salary expectations, I feel like I lowballed myself. I wanna talk to my manager and ask for a salary increase.

What's the best way of talking to manager? What should I ask? How should I frame it smoothly?

How to negotiate if the manager postpones or doesn't agree? At what cadence can I ask my manager again?

Does the approach vary between FAANG companies, other big tech companies, and startups?

Does the timing matter? Should I wait for performance reviews and ask my manager only if I get a good performance rating? Or should I ask after successfully launching some project? Or can I ask during any 1-1?

Do I need to interview and get an offer from another company before asking my manager? If I negotiate showing another offer, will my manager think bad about me?

When asking for a raise, should I aks for an explicit salary figure, or should I ask for a raise without citing any explicit value?

If my manager actually agrees for a raise, what percentage increase is it okay to ask for?

When my performance rating is good, will my company automatically increase my salary or do they increase only when I explicitly ask for it?